Times and Measures

New Semester

Jan 30, 2008

So obviously, my good intentions about blogging more often didn’t work out so well upon returning to Hopkins– but hey, life is complex. So what’re the cool (seriously!) things that’ve been stealing my time away from the Blogoverse?

And now, classes have started at Hopkins; today’s the third day of the new semester, because Hopkins has extraordinarily short semesters. This is my last semester with any undergraduate status, and it should be fun– I’m taking all those courses I really should have taken before:

I’m also enjoying all the stares, gasps, and cries of amazement every time I pull out my OLPC, which is coming with me to every class; not only do I get more battery life, a faster recharge time, and better WiFi than other laptops, but it also weighs nearly nothing and is indestructable– entirely unlike most laptops. So it’s a fun time. I did get the dreaded alt-key-stuck bug, but while I could have spent a month without the laptop and shipped it back to be fixed, I just used the power of Linux to implement the fix the OLPC people came up with, which works perfectly well (I didn’t need a left alt key anyway). The other big OLPC advantage is that I can bring my laptop and sit in Starbucks for a few hours on occasion, since I have the OLPC’s free year of T-Mobile WiFi– I’m not sure I’d actually pay money for Internet in Starbucks, but it’s quite nice simply to have it. And at the end of the year, who knows? Maybe I won’t be able to live without it.

That’s all from me for now– nerdy blog posts are upcoming, but first, I have to go sketch out how to best torture educate Java babies.


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